


How to Become a Dragon

by veritably_mad



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 23:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3429125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veritably_mad/pseuds/veritably_mad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stop jumping off furniture, because you’re too old for that now. Keep dreaming. Draw birds, especially their wings, all over the coloring books your relatives give you. Start reading. A lot. Your dad tells you that you can be anything you want when you grow up. Believe him. Later, realize he thought he was lying. Know that he spoke an accidental truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Become a Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> This will most likely be the only 100% original work I ever post on here. I wrote it for a creative writing class, and I just...like it. Even though it's in second person.
> 
> So here you go. I hope you like it, too.

When you’re tall enough, stand on tiptoe to stare out the skinny windows. Cling to the wide sill with stubby fingers. Watch the birds. Yell whenever you see one land on the black metal balcony across the street your apartment overlooks.

Dream of flying. Flap your arms and run around your bedroom, down the hall, onto your parents’ bed. Jump off. Jump off stairs, chairs, the couch, the beds. Land on your face. Cry. Let Daddy pick you up and murmur, “Be careful. Be careful. Just don’t jump too high.” Ignore him. Hold in the hurt. Flap harder, run faster, until you think you could almost jump out the window and not hit the ground. 

When a bigger bird than you’re used to seeing builds a nest across the street, you point and shout until Mommy comes in and asks what all the fuss is about. “Oh, it’s a falcon!” she says, and Daddy gets the binoculars. Decide you like falcons better than the little fluffy birds and fat gray pigeons. Falcons are sharp on the ends.

Stop jumping off furniture, because you’re too old for that now. Keep dreaming. Draw birds, especially their wings, all over the coloring books your relatives give you. Start reading. A lot. Your dad tells you that you can be anything you want when you grow up. Believe him. Later, realize he thought he was lying. Know that he spoke an accidental truth.

On your eighth birthday, your aunt gives you a book with a big winged lizard on the cover. A dragon. You had a book about dragons before, but you lost it. Read this new one. Read it again. Again. Again. Demand more dragon books.

Explore the fantasy genre with all the reckless excitement of a questing adventurer. Read about dwarves, goblins, elves, fairies, magical swords, and epic battles that carve new paths for history to follow. Follow the genre into science fiction, one vaguely defined book at a time. Read about aliens, zombies, space ships, time travel, ray guns, and interplanetary wars that leave civilizations decimated. Nostalgia almost knocks a hole in your chest when you see that second first dragon book in a shop. Pile new dragon novels into your arms as a sort of apology for leaving fantasyland for so long. Put all but four back, and come back for the rest whenever you have more money.

By 14, research the myths your favorite creatures came from. Buy books about them—textbooks and encyclopedias about legends and lore. Find an esoteric shop that sells everything you love: delicate figurines of dragons and griffins, paintings with bold strokes depicting warriors and unicorns, board games, books, even real metal swords. Beg your parents for one of those. Fail.

By 16, be a regular patron of the esoteric shop. Own a copy of every spell book in it. Read the spells aloud. Not because you think they’ll work, obviously, but because you like the way the syllables roll, trip, and drip off your tongue, turn sharp or sweet. They sound like they _should_ have power, even though they don’t. The shop owner likes you because you don’t butcher the language and you aren’t trying to curse someone into loving you. Or just plain curse someone.

Buy candles and incense. Paint symbols on an old white sheet. Go through the rituals one at a time, like prayers. Calming. Let your parents think you’re Buddhist or something. You aren’t sure what you are. You don’t think what you’re doing counts as a religion, because it isn’t Wicca or anything organized like that. It’s just ritual meditation based on fake magic spells. Or something. It doesn’t matter.

After school, meditate until you can feel your skull open up and let the sky pour in. Send your feet into the ground like roots. Climb trees in the park. Become wild when no one is looking. By now, your parents worry you’re a Satanist, so you tell them you’re Wiccan instead. They don’t think that’s much better.

At 17, accidentally levitate a candle. Almost set the building on fire when you shriek and it flies into a basket of laundry. Hyperventilate. Your room smells like burnt fabric. Your world is turning sideways and inside out. Wonder what the hell was in that incense.

Take a break from the magic shops and rituals. Lock the spell books and the painted sheet and the candles in a trunk half-filled with clothes that don’t fit anymore and shove it under your bed. Read realistic fiction. Let the sky pour out of your mind instead of into it and fill up with classic literature, equations, historical dates, and names. Pull your roots from the earth and walk like the rest of the world: on your toes, never settling, light and fast.

Grow heavy. Tired. You don’t understand how people can be stuffed so full and still move so much, so quickly, without being sick with it.

Slow down. Start meditating again—without the candles. A week after you turn 18, drag the trunk through the dust and set your room like you used to: the spread cloth with candles lit at the corners and the cones of incense on a simple carved stand. The words are familiar and soothing. Test them against your teeth. Chew on them, but don’t spit them out. Let them fall.

Read fantasy again. Imagine what it would be like to become a dragon. Intelligent but wild, grounded but soaring, civilized but dangerous. Hold that feeling in your chest. Pull it over your skin like scales, push it through your fingertips like claws, spread it from your shoulders like wings. Your breath is smoke and flame, and when you smile at your teachers, your friends, your mother and father, your teeth are long and bladed.

All the clutter life shoved into your head is rearranged, cleared away. You are open, but not empty. Remember how to fill yourself with just air. Breathe in the universe, then let it go. Stretch imagined wings. Spark your dragon-heart to burn and spread fire through your limbs.

Pass out.

Wake up one breath at a time.

You feel…settled. Whole, like parts of you had been missing, but you hadn’t known until now. Freed, as if for the first time you are wearing clothes that fit you instead of being two sizes too small.

Open your eyes.

Your room is sharp edges and deep shadows and bright colors, sharper and deeper and brighter than you have ever seen. You can count the threads of a green shirt in the recesses of your closet. This doesn’t strike you as odd until you see your broken glasses a foot in front of your face.

Try to stand. End up on all fours. That’s what feels natural, not two feet, and when you look at them you see silver talons embedded in coal-black, scaled paws tinged with ember.

When you panic, accidentally tear five long gashes in your painted sheet and the thick gray carpet beneath it. Try to smooth it out, but give up. Fluff sticks to your claws. Stretch your wings and knock over a lamp. Turn and whack your desk with your slender whip of a tail. This body was not meant for cramped rooms.

Convince yourself you’re dreaming. Disprove that with both the pain test and the scent test. You slap yourself on your muzzle and almost cut your own eye, and when you take a whiff of incense, you sneeze because of how much stronger the smell is in your new nose.

Convince yourself you’ve gone insane. You can’t disprove that. Everyone knows that the person who says he _isn’t_ crazy absolutely _is_.

Curl in the middle of the floor, tail close around your feet and wings tucked tight by your spine. Grow restless and afraid. Sunlight slices through the window, calling you. Answer it. Move carefully. Open the latch and slide the pane up. Leave apologetic scars in the wood. It’s narrow, but wide enough. Climb through. Perch on the ledge. Spread your wings. Know that if you jump out this window, you won’t hit the ground.

Overhead, a falcon shrieks.


End file.
